Alien Supercivilizations Absent from 100k Nearby Galaxies (2015)
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
We define life as "what occurs on earth" and we expect to find it elsewhere in a universe with infinite dimension, variation and depth. Wolfram's principle of computational equivalence may very well be right, we could see life everywhere and not even know it. Maybe to recognize life we have to be related to it, maybe theres some sort of temporal entanglement going on or something, I don't know. All I do know is that a bug on my shirt doesn't know that I have a face, love my wife, talk to people on the internet, drive a car, look at pictures of mars or even that a planet exists, much less other planets. And we expect to be able to recognize higher intelligence when we see it? It's unrealistic, it's a simplistic mindset that shows a lack of understanding of even what it is this universe is doing here. And I don't claim to know that either, but I do see that theres infinite dimension no matter what resolution you look, everywhere, all the time, happening real time, and if its too big or too small I can't perceive it. Maybe the same is true everywhere for everything that can experience. Maybe observant entities that emerged completely separately are incapable of even perceiving each other.
Poetic license? Not only are there not infinite dimensions, none of the three or four dimensions we know about are infinite.
> lack of understanding
"Simplistic" understanding based on primitive evidence is still better than seeing "infinite dimensions" without any data to back it up. It's not obvious that any higher beings (compared to humans) even exist, they might they might not. So maybe we should focus on detecting any signs of any kind of intelligence or life in the first place (after even a bug should be able to tell a human apart from a rock when it bumps into one?).
The goal is to answer: “is there relatable life that has any change of interacting with the human mind somewhere in the nearby speck of our seemingly-infinite universe” this get’s phrased as “is there life out there” in common parlance.
You make it sound like they're unimaginative dolts.
It's not simplistic, it's simply practical. Either we search for life as we know it, or we don't search at all.
You can pontificate all you want about how incomprehensible extraterrestrial life could be, but where does that get us?
Further, I find that ant/human trope to be cerebral wankery.
Sure, ants can't comprehend what they've encountered, even as they crawl up our leg. But the gap between our intelligence levels is enormous.
I think it's much more likely that humans fall far enough right on the intelligence spectrum that we would be able to spot and recognize other forms of life in the universe, even if they happen to be 100x more intelligent than us.
So we are the drunk looking for his keys in the pool of light under the streetlamp, but not in the dark carpark where we dropped them?
Even a drunk under a lamp is capable of having a moment of realization that he may want to look in the dark carpark, as he was there earlier. That's within his realm of experience.
But please, tell me how we are to even begin looking for life as we don't know it? What are your suggestions?
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In Star Control II [1] the player meets an alien race which admits to having tampered with humanity's DNA to "alter its smell" so that other, hostile civilisations can't "smell" us. Maybe there's someone looking out for us and hid us in a quiet corner :-)
I have read the sci-fi short novel when I was a kid, and that was 80ies. The future earth have found signs of life on some distant planet and the science ship was sent to investigate, they got there but could not find anything on the empty rocky planet, the somewhat detective story leads them to realize the life is on the star of that system, not on the planet, and intelligent creatures are plasma based life forms. Unfortunately I barely remember this story, and cannot remember the name or author, I've read hundreds of sci-fi back then.
I also read some random popular science post about subatomic processes in cells, it gave some examples of which I recall one that fascinated me, it appears that there is a gate in a cell that opens or closes by a single electron to let a water molecule in or out I guess. This ignited my fantasy, what if there are more subatomic stuff going on in out bodies? How far it can go in reality and in fiction? What if our memory is subatomic? Could we build something on subatomic level, a logic gate for example? Can a life form be fully subatomic?
Also there is a galaxy on the Orion's belt, and the Orion is a cat, they briefly and somewhat humorously explored the idea in Men in Black which I watched many times.
There is quantum realm in the Ant-Man series. If it existed I guess super civilisation would try to go there or stay there to be more energy efficient.
There is also dr Manhattan, whose blue body I believe is photons. Imagine he was not the only one in that experiment, and our entire human race followed him, what would our civilisation be? No buildings, no machines, no crops, no transportation, would we even stay on the planet? What we would do freed from servicing our fragile bodies most of our time? I guess we would just gather together, have fun, party, make new life, teach each other endlessly. So maybe that's what stars are, each just have trillion of dr Manhattan offsprings and that's why we cannot see any signs of life cause we're looking for meatballs.
The Caleban have their own reasons for contacting organic sentient species. But be really careful about getting involved in any contracts with them.
Even with those simple extrapolations, it’s easy to see that we can stick a few billion ‘humans’ (brains-on-chip) in a solar powered spaceship and just let it hang there for eternity or it could do a journey to somewhere. But what’s the point of a journey as inside this relatively tiny ship, these brains will live in a world (probably a clone of older earth) with a universe around it they can explore.
This seems all rather feasible given time and we would not seem very advanced from the outside; you would hardly be able to detect us at all and yet 100s of billions people live in perpetual paradise (or hell, but again; why would you make it bad if you don’t have to).
Related question is do species really need intellect at all and how much. It could be that the main purpose of intellect is to increase chances to survive, but what if civilisation already figured survival, will they even need to stay intelligent? Maybe their goal is to be happier or maybe have billion orgasms per second.
Another more obvious reason to explore the universe is lack of resources, at least Earth was mostly explored to be exploited. If resources are solved, one reason to explore less.
Most of the financial impetus for exploration comes from the promise of access to scare resources. But if you have the technology to traverse the stars then your species is either able to harness unfathomable amounts of energy such that you can bend space-time or you've done some kind of wild genetic engineering/cybernetic enhancements to the point where it's not really bound by the limitations of whatever biology its planetary evolution set it up with.
In both cases, they would have the means to functionally be living in a post-scarcity society. Either their consciousness is stored in some kind of long-term solid-state storage that can survive millennia long trips through space or energy is so cheap and available that it's hard to imagine them needing to keep going and searching to find more stuff. After you've explored and catalogued a hundred planets it's hard to imagine any real impetus to keep going.
Human civilization is already projected to cap out in population at around 11 Billion, and that's driven primarily by cultural and economic factors deriving from technology around access to healthcare, education, and other sources of diversion/entertainment/fulfillment. The idea that an advanced civilization must necessarily keep growing and growing in size doesn't seem to hold up for our own experience on Earth.
We do that?
It's actually quite comforting that we didn't seem to find any "type 3" by this definition. If we did, that would be a civilization with no respect for life beyond its own, and thus, would be one to fear.
Could you give me an idea of what current concerns are? I haven’t kept up on this.
Simply consider the scaling involved if China and India want US style resource conservation per capita.
China in India are roughly 10 times the amount of people as the US.
It is useless to generate huge amounts of power thinly dispersed over galactic scales.
A society capable of high power densities, like direct energy-conversion fusion for starters, can realize fantastic feats, as opposed to somebody collecting sunlight over vast volumes of space, but lacking adequate portable storage.
The conclusion: civilization is uncommon OR we are unable to detect civilizations for some reason OR there is something intrinsic about civilization that prohibits the development of "spreaders".
It'd be practically impossible to even just have a meaningful information exchange between worlds that are hundreds or even thousands of light years apart. Trading goods would be useless - it'd take thousands of years for a one way trip. Messages would be obsolete the moment they're sent, because the receiver would only be able to detect them after hundreds or thousands of years.
All those fantasies rely on FTL or basically unchanging civilisations that stagnate for aeons.
I think it's the destiny of all intelligent life to merge into the ether and that happens in the astronomical blink of an eye after industrialization.
The expectation that any truly advanced civilization is still primitive enough for us to see is likely the flawed assumption here.
There's probably plenty of resources for even extensive interstellar civilizations in asteroids.
Once you can cart around a solar system pretty easily, it's probably far less resource intensive to mine Asteroids and not have to deal with gravity wells, atmospheres, and chemically reactive environments.
If you dropped in the solar system needing rare earths would you conquer humanity, extract the resources from our metal poor crust, and drag them up to orbit, or park your ship next to that asteroid with sixteen quintillion dollars of rare earths?
Even mercury or a host of moons would be far easier.
If you can do everything in space, why even bother with planets anymore.
It must be a special case of overconfidence to believe to know what a supercivilization would consider "better".
For reference, a K3 civilisation worth of Nicoll-Dyson beams can gravitationally unbind[0] 10^9 Earthlike planets in just under 26 days.
And yes, I understand that fusion is "always 10 years away" even with Helion, but it does seem like it's coming within the next 100 years sometime.
Considering fusion or fission can't beat solar on the planet with solar being hamstrung by our atmosphere...
When was everybody?
Space is a very large place. But spacetime is doubly so.
On earth it takes a few tents thousands years to have a civilization vanish. Put 1 million and even the most advanced civilization will become unrecognizable dust.
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Heck, it's even possible that such civilizations once existed on this planet.
IMHO there's a fair chance we're past such a filter. The origin of life from simple organic matter (abiogenesis) may be extremely unlikely (although most researchers currently working on this say it was probably not that complicated). Or the origin of big, energy rich cell life (eucaryotes) was a very rare event (it did require colossal changes in a very short time frame). Or maybe the origin and survival of intelligence is the hard part.
But i think more likely the filter is ahead of us. Less than a century ago we invented nuclear weapons. Already had a few near misses on a civilization ending nuclear war. More and more countries are acquiring such weapons. And this is provided we got extremely lucky that separating weapon grade isotope of uranium from the naturally occurring ores on Earth surface is very hard. If it was easier for small dictatorships and organizations like Isis to get nukes we'd be probably back to stone age by now. And with the scientific and technological progress going faster than ever, sooner or later we will invent even more powerful weapons, that are easier to produce - which will make the survival of the human race problematic.
There could be that if you bundle together all of these major events that either kill all, or set us back, that it takes more than 5-10 billion years to produce a civilization that can advance far beyond their planet.
The dinosaurs were close to 0.1 billion years ago, and they existed for 0.165 billion years. So repeat 100 tries and your luck runs out. Sorry if there's math or other mistakes.
Of course we haven't had 0.1 billion years of intelligent life, but 0.003 billion... I believe there were more than one extinction event in the 0.165B years of dinosaurs.
I shared a lab with an instructor at my university who made photovoltaics that absorbed the non visible spectrum but allowed visible light to pass through.
I'm sure these are thought of already but I don't know how/if they are looking for all of these
* Absence of a star (fully engrossed in a Dyson structure) -- this seems like how a black hole.would be identified by circling bodies around nothing
* A visible star, but it has some part of its em spectrum clipped because it's totally encased by a sphere that only absorbs a portion of the em spectrum
* The Dyson sphere is large enough to encase many galaxies (including us)
* there's Dyson sphere s but they don't rotate so we don't see any sharp change in luminosity
* There's a binary star, but one is a Dyson sphere and appears as a planetary body
Depending on the Hubble constant, a z of 2 is more than 8000 mpc, 27 billion light years. That's a big search volume, and they didn't find anything obviously artificial.
If it's the Dark Forest scenario then it's simply not safe to show any technosignatures at all, ruling out megastructures entirely.
Radio emissions are actually much harder to detect because they're weaker than all the light bouncing off the planet. Aliens aren't picking up TV or radio broadcasts. Those become undetectable a little outside the solar system. The signal strength fades (due to the inverse square law) to under natural radio background a little into the Oort Cloud. Only very deliberate high power and highly directional signals can be detectable at interstellar ranges.
The Dark Forest theory is just silly and I'd go so far as to say pseudoscience. It just doesn't make any sense if you think about it for a few minutes.
Could be that ethics and philosophy ends up dictating that you stay out of it. There's speculation that they've sent probes.
Could be they have little to gain from contact, and prefer to leave us to our own devices. After all, it is the right thing to do.
Is what you want to read if you're interested in the fermi paradox.
How could we, a species that hasn’t progressed that far, know what advanced civilizations look like?
Same reason an Alien spacecraft has never crash landed on Earth - Aliens don't crash the car.
One of the interesting concerns about being an interstellar civilization kind of related to the great ant war that I think was documented in a Kurgesstz video about the relentless expanding invasive army ants around the world.
They used to not attack neighboring colonies because they all shared the same smell. At some point one of the species diverged and had as a different smell and now the unopposed growth of the one species now fights in huge battle between their own species that just smell slightly different.
Likewise, if you have a large distance between two stellar colonies. There's going to be a smell evolution over time.
Humans fight a lot of intraspecies wars but not nearly to the extinctive ferocity that a war between two different species results in.
How long before you send individuals to another star do they consider themselves another species?
I mean look at what happened with Hitler and other genocidal actions.
Isolation due to the communication delay (e.g. ~8 years round-trip in case of Earth to Alpha Cen) and the likely need for adaptation to the new world (be that by means of evolution or genetic engineering) would drive both home world and colonies apart quickly.
UDG galaxies have low levels of interstellar matter. A type 2 civilization would likely prefer to have all matter either generating/capturing energy or to be used for their own pursuits.
UDG galaxies tend to be older. It seems reasonable that type 2 civilizations would be in older galaxies where they had lots of time to develop.
Because of how dark matter works, it seems inexplicable for it to not cluster with regular matter at galactic scales/during the formation of a galaxy. Even weirder is that instead of a normal distribution or spectrum of regular matter to dark matter, almost every galaxy has it at a 1:5 ratio, except UDGs which are either at one extreme (~no dark matter) or another (1:90+ for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_44). This disequilibrium, similar to disequilibria on Earth, suggests life. But since this is occurring at galactic scale it suggests a galaxy spanning civilization.
The existence of UDGs at both extremes could be explained by some process (that discriminates between regular and dark matter) by which matter is transferred between galaxies or even converted between the two forms. Whether this happens seems to be yes/no which at galactic scales seems explainable as “has an advanced civilization”. And perhaps in some cases this is due to a galaxy spanning civilization doing some kind of resource extraction from one to another.
Finally, for UDGs with almost all matter being dark, this may represent an almost-complete conversion of the galaxy to a type 2 civilization. As expected, these are very rare because the time to convert a galaxy to this state should be very small compared to the beginning of the transition and end of it.
This whole article rests on the notion that Dyson spheres will eliminate waste energy through black body radiation in a way that’s observable to us, but an advanced culture capable of building these things could likely think of workarounds. I mean, I’m sitting on my couch and I think you could probably figure out a way to direct this in a certain direction that would be invisible from most perspectives. And maybe whatever technology helps manipulate dark matter or convert between regular and dark matter would help you radiate dark matter instead of EM.
I offer my solution to the Drake equation, which can be neatly expressed by the notion of opportunity cost: We don't see Dyson spheres because at every order of scale and complexity there are an almost infinite variety of possible time and resource consuming projects, the overwhelming majority of which will be not be encoded as light emitted from a distant star.
> In some sense it doesn’t matter how a galactic civilization gets or uses its power because the second law of thermodynamics makes energy use hard to hide. They could construct Dyson spheres, they could get power from rotating black holes, they could build giant computer networks in the cold outskirts of galaxies, and all of that would produce waste heat. Wright’s team went right to the peak of the curve for where you’d expect to see any sort of waste heat, and they’re just not seeing anything obvious.
In any case their funding came from The Templeton Foundation and all they did was look at existing imagery.
Either way, I'd rather live in a world where we looked and didn't find anything than one where we didn't bother looking.